By MICHAEL SLOVANOS
THE Human Rights Law Alliance (HRLA) has launched an urgent appeal for donations after members of the LGTBQ cultural Marxist anti-free speech lobby launched yet another round of legal harassment against the head of the Family First political party, Lyle Shelton.
HRLA principal lawyer John Steenhof says Shelton’s legal battle goes back six years to 2020 when he “did something that should be unremarkable in a free society – he spoke up against a Brisbane City Council library Drag Queen Story Time event for young children.”
“Lyle publicly raised concerns, arguing that drag queens are dangerous role models for children and that children should not be exposed to sexualised performances or confusing messages about identity,” says Steenhof.
“Many Australians quietly agreed, but instead of open debate, Lyle was dragged into a legal battle.Two drag performers filed a vilification complaint against him in a Queensland tribunal.
“What followed was years of stressful, costly, and relentless legal proceedings. In 2023, the tribunal dismissed the complaint. Lyle’s criticism of the drag queens was judged not to be hate speech.
“That victory should have been the end, but it wasn’t. The drag queens appealed with the help of government-funded lawyers and pro bono counsel.
“The original victory has now been reversed on appeal in an appeal tribunal decision that raises serious concerns about free speech, censorship and timely justice.”
The result is that Shelton is being forced into the Supreme Court to challenge the findings by the appeal tribunal member and after six long years, the fight continues.
“This is the reality many Australians now face: Say something unpopular, even respectfully, and you may be punished through process,” says Steenhof.
“Most people simply couldn’t endure this. They don’t have the resources. They don’t have the legal support.That’s why HRLA stepped in to defend Lyle and it’s why we’re asking for your help today.”
Steenhof says a critical funding target approaching – it will take $84,500 by April 30 to fund taking Lyle’s defence to the Queensland Supreme Court.
“Will you help ensure he can continue? Every dollar will make a real difference. Every dollar will help carry this case forward. Every dollar helps push back against a system where the process itself becomes the punishment.
“Please stand with Lyle today and donate to this new defence. Your support ensures that Australians are not silenced for speaking about what they believe is best for children. Please take this chance to stand for truth, for freedom, and for the protection of children,” said Steenhof,
Cairns News notes that the Shelton case represents a clear attempt by the neo-Marxist Labor-Green establishment to destroy Christianity and its historic role of influencing and guiding the common law of England and the English-speaking world.
So-called “anti-hate” and “anti-vilification” laws come straight out of the old Marxist-Maoist communist jurisdictions where they were used to silence and punish “anti-state” dissent. The same is now happening in Australia and other western nations.
The Institute of Public Affairs policy director, Chris Berg, wrote on this back in 2012: “Concepts like hate speech, racial vilification, and group defamation were conceived in significantly different political environments to our own.”
Berg wrote that the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, adopted in 1966 by the United Nations, made a bold statement on behalf of freedom of speech in Article 19, but self-cancelled by adding the caveat that “speech should be subject to restrictions to respect of the rights or reputations of others, or the protection of national security or of public order … or of public health or morals”.
“Yet the caveats went further than that. Article 20 sets the stage of a major new class of prohibited speech in Western liberal democracies. ‘Any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence shall be prohibited by law’,” Berg wrote. “With Article 20, freedom of expression is completely defanged.”
He noted that before this freedom of speech and the press had already been outlawed by the Soviet Bolsheviks. “A decree signed by Lenin declared that ‘the bourgeois press is one of the mightiest weapons of the bourgeoisie’.
“His decree was described as temporary, but draconian restrictions on freedom of speech lasted until the collapse of the Soviet Union. ‘Why should freedom of speech and freedom of the press be allowed?’ asked Lenin. A government ‘would not allow opposition by lethal weapons. Ideas are much more fatal than guns’…
“So when the Soviet bloc participated in the framing of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights in 1948, it was no surprise that it stridently opposed the blanket statement in support of freedom of speech.”
Under existing state and Commonwealth laws, it is a criminal offence to groom a child for the purpose of sexual activity. Under Queensland’s Criminal Code Act 1899, it is an offence to, “without legitimate reason, wilfully expose a child under the age of 16 to any indecent object or any indecent film, videotape, audiotape, picture, photograph or printed or written matter”.
However, in recent years the global LGBTQ lobby, through transgender drag queens, has flirted with these laws by running, across the western world, so-called drag queen story times for children, that are marketed as “educational and fun times for kids” as “crazy characters” dressed in drag read stories to children.
The fact that drag queens, at least in the minds of adults, often exude sexual innuendo and deliberately blur male-female distinction might be seen as a deliberate attempt to plant the seeds of gender confusion in young minds – a type of ideological grooming.
It is not coincidental that this same LGBTQ lobby, that historically comes out of the New Left “sexual liberation” cult, advocates for “gender fluidity” among young people and even the sexual mutilation by surgery of young people who are told they can question and change the gender they are born with.
Gender traditionally means the biological reality of male or female, but in recent decades this has been twisted by cultural Marxist ideological claptrap into something other than male and female. The World Health Organisation definition of gender is a prime example:
“Gender refers to the characteristics of women, men, girls and boys that are socially constructed. This includes norms, behaviours and roles associated with being a woman, man, girl or boy, as well as relationships with each other. As a social construct, gender varies from society to society and can change over time,” the WHO states.
“Gender is hierarchical and produces inequalities that intersect with other social and economic inequalities. Gender-based discrimination intersects with other factors of discrimination, such as ethnicity, socioeconomic status, disability, age, geographic location, gender identity and sexual orientation, among others. This is referred to as intersectionality.
“Gender interacts with but is different from sex, which refers to the different biological and physiological characteristics of females, males and intersex persons, such as chromosomes, hormones and reproductive organs. Gender and sex are related to but different from gender identity. Gender identity refers to a person’s deeply felt, internal and individual experience of gender, which may or may not correspond to the person’s physiology or designated sex at birth.”
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